Montana Life Study Guide

Montana’s life provisions read like the NAIC baseline until you try to find one. The most valuable fact here is an address rather than a number, and several provisions are drafted a subsection wider than their national counterparts.

The free look is not where you will go looking for it

Every other required life provision lives in Title 33, chapter 20. The free look does not. MCA 33-15-415 sits in chapter 15, The Insurance Contract, and gives the owner 10 days from delivery to return the policy, after which it is “void from the beginning.” It reaches “each individual life or disability insurance policy,” so one statute serves two lines — and a candidate who searches chapter 20 alone answers wrongly that Montana mandates none.

Three clocks then run at once. That statute covers the ordinary policy. A replacement gets 30 days with an unconditional full refund of all premiums or considerations paid, and it comes from a rule — ARM 6.6.306(1)(d). An annuity sold where the disclosure document and Buyer’s Guide were not provided at or before application gets not less than 15 days under MCA 33-20-905(3), running concurrently with any other free look.

The suicide clause, and the money rule one subsection down

MCA 33-20-121(1)(b)(v) caps a suicide exclusion at 2 years from issue, and it is the fifth item in a list of what a policy may exclude: war, aviation, a specified hazardous occupation, residence “outside the continental United States and Canada,” and suicide — read that fourth limb exactly, because Mexico and the Caribbean are outside the statutory zone. The money rule sits separately, at 33-20-121(2): a policy carrying any permitted exclusion must pay “an amount not less than a reserve” if death occurs in the excluded circumstance. Montana is a reserve state, not a return-of-premium state, and that duty reaches five exclusions rather than one. Subsection (3) lifts five kinds out of the section entirely — industrial life, group life, disability, reinsurance and annuities — along with disability-benefit and accidental-death rider provisions.

Incontestability, grace, reinstatement, and a wider age clause

MCA 33-20-105(1) gives the standard 2 years from the date of issue, and (2)(a) adds the Montana point: on an exchange or conversion with the same insurer, the period runs from the original policy’s date of issue. MCA 33-20-104 requires a 30-day grace period, or a month of not less than 30 days at the insurer’s option; the four-week alternative is a carve-out for industrial policies billed more often than monthly. MCA 33-20-112 allows reinstatement within 3 years of default — 2 years for industrial — on evidence of insurability and overdue premiums, with interest not exceeding 6% per year compounded annually. MCA 33-20-107 adjusts benefits to the correct age not only of the insured but of “any other person whose age is considered in determining the premium.”

Policy loans — two eras and an insurer’s election

For policies issued after 1 October 1985, MCA 33-20-135 lets the insurer elect between a fixed maximum of not more than 8% a year and an adjustable rate, whose ceiling is the greater of the published monthly average or the policy’s cash-value crediting rate plus 1%. The older regime at 33-20-131(1) is 6%, or up to 8% — 7.4% where interest is paid annually in advance — for policies issued on or after 1 January 1980 with the commissioner’s authorization. In the newer era the ceiling is the insurer’s choice.

The funeral director bar, and the one narrow way through

MCA 33-17-211(1)(h) is drafted in the negative and reaches only a life or disability applicant, in three limbs: not a funeral director, undertaker or mortician (i); not an officer, employee or representative of one (ii); holding no interest in and taking no benefit from such a business (iii). It bars the license, not merely the sale — and the exception is written into (1)(h) itself, which opens “except as permitted by 33-20-1501(1)(c)(ii).” The way through is narrow: MCA 33-20-1501(1)(c)(i) bars a Title 37, chapter 19 licensee from selling funeral insurance written inside a life policy, while (1)(c)(ii) permits a limited policy with a guaranteed death benefit if a person licensed under Title 37, chapter 19, parts 3 and 4 also holds a Montana life producer license — initial limit $25,000 under (1)(d).

Replacement — every numeric clock belongs to an insurer

Learn this as a question of whose duty. ARM 6.6.305 puts no day count on the producer at all — the duties are event-anchored: obtain a signed statement about existing coverage, and present and read a signed replacement notice “not later than at the time of taking the application.” Every number sits on a carrier. The replacing insurer notifies affected existing insurers within five business days of a completed application (ARM 6.6.306(1)(b)), and the existing insurer furnishes policy values within five business days of the owner’s request (ARM 6.6.308(1)(b)).